The Graduation Party in the Fire Hall

The first ones were from the care center. Kim the scheduler, and two of the girls from the night shift, still a little puffy from sleep, carrying a card with all the staff names on it.

Then Mrs. Haugen, the teacher who had noticed Brooke reading every problem three times.

Then the fire department families. Dale’s wife, Sue, with a pan of rhubarb bars. The Kowalski grandkids, the extra sprinkles kids, who went straight to Brooke and hugged her around the legs.

By one-thirty the guest book had thirty names. By two it had sixty.

I stopped hanging streamers and started cutting more brats, and Aunt Pam sent my cousin’s husband Jeff to the Kwik Trip for more ice twice.

People came from the Lutheran church and people came from the Catholic church. People came whose grandmothers I had bathed and dressed and held the hands of at the end.

They came in pairs and in carloads and in their Sunday clothes on their way to some other open house down the road.

A man I barely knew came in and shook Brooke’s hand and said, “You’re the one who remembers I take a small cone with no curl on top.” He put a card in the basket and left. I found out later he drives for the co-op.

At three o’clock Brooke came and found me behind the food table.

Her face was pink and she had potato salad on her white dress, a little spot on the hip, and she didn’t care.

“Mom,” she said. “Mom, there’s no more room to park. They’re parking on the grass by the ball diamond.”

“I know, honey.”

“Mom, there’s like a hundred people here.”

I had been keeping a count in my head the way I count meds, without meaning to.

“There’s a hundred and nine,” I said. “Go say hi to Mrs. Lindstrom’s daughter, she drove over from Neillsville.”

At about three-fifteen, the hall got loud in a new way, and I looked up from the roaster and saw them coming in through the open bay door, past the red fire truck, in a line.

Eight kids in their Dairy Queen shirts and visors. Tom, the manager, a big quiet man in his fifties, behind them, carrying something in a cardboard box with both hands.

Brooke saw them and put her hand over her mouth.

Tom walked straight up to her and set the box on the table.

It was a Dairy Queen ice cream cake, the big one, with a graduation cap drawn on it in blue frosting.

Somebody had written her name across the top in letters that leaned uphill.

“We closed for an hour,” Tom said. “Put a sign on the door. Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, so the owner’s going to have something to say. I don’t care.”

“Tom,” Brooke said. “Tom, you can’t close.”

“Already did,” he said. “You’ve covered for every one of these kids at least once. They wanted to come.” He looked around at the hall, at the streamers, at the line by the food table.